Techmeme
January 8, 2023, 1:15 AM

Top News

New York Times:
PitchBook: investors pumped $1.37B+ into generative AI companies across 78 deals in 2022, almost as much as was invested in the previous five years combined  —  An investment frenzy over “generative artificial intelligence” has gripped Silicon Valley, as tools that generate text …
Tony Ho Tran / The Daily Beast:
GPTZero, a Princeton student's app that uses perplexity and burstiness metrics to help detect whether a human or ChatGPT wrote an academic essay, goes viral  —  “Humans deserve to know when the writing isn't human.”  —  Deputy Editor, Innovation & Tech … Edward Tian was fast asleep when his bot broke a website.
Josh Nicholas / The Guardian:
The number of active users on Mastodon dropped from a peak of over 2.5M in early December 2022 to about 1.8M in the first week of January 2023  —  More than 130,000 people were joining the new independent social media network a day in November.  So why hasn't it taken off?
Aaron Holmes / The Information:
Sources: Microsoft is working on incorporating existing and future versions of OpenAI's GPT into Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, and its other productivity apps  —  In a move that could change how more than a billion people write documents, presentations and emails, Microsoft …
Kylie Robison / Fortune:
Sources: some former US Twitter employees finally received their severance agreements, offering only one month of base pay as severance and no prorated bonuses  —  Following further delays this week, some former Twitter employees finally received their official severance agreements on Saturday …
Bloomberg:
Sources: Twitter cuts more staff in its diminished trust and safety team handling global content moderation and in a unit mitigating hate speech and harassment  —  Twitter Inc., under new owner Elon Musk, has made deeper cuts into its already radically diminished trust and safety team handling …
Bloomberg:
Some companies are taking a liberal interpretation of California's pay transparency law with wide pay ranges; one Netflix job posting has a $90K-$900K pay range  —  A Tesla Inc. software engineer could earn anywhere from $83,200 to $417,600.  Netflix Inc. has one job posting advertising …

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More News

Andy Greenberg / Wired:
Bloomberg:

Earlier Picks

Reuters:
Parmy Olson / Bloomberg:
Mitchell Clark / The Verge:
Thomas Brewster / Forbes: